Word: treader
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...works. There were a song cycle, Vox damans in Deserto, a piano suite called Evocations and a short composition for muted brass called Angels. Most impressive was the granite-hewn intensity of his orchestral miniatures, Men and Mountains, Portals and Organum. His most ambitious work, the tone poem Sun Treader glinted with an ice-age grandeur, evoking craggy ranges and northern lights...
...others had intervened. His work has an atonal quality that often sounds like Schoenberg's middle-period serialism. Yet Ruggles had no use for the strict twelve-tone row, which he called "a dog chasing its tail." He evolved his own technique. "You know that place in Sun Treader where the canon comes round and overlaps with its retrograde?" he asks. "It took me a year to make that turn...
...captain of the ship all the time." His father Nathaniel? 'Drunk all the time." His boyhood hero, Actor Richard Mansfield? "A fine actor but a mean bastard," To this day, he has only one answer when asked about the state of American music: "I think Sun Treader is the greatest composition" And his reply to the obligatory question about his remarkable longevity is always the same: He thrives on dirty stories. "If it hadn't been for all those laughs, I'da been dead years...
CARL RUGGLES: SUN TREADER (Columbia). Ruggles spent six years on his symphony, which had its premiere in Paris in 1932 and in the U.S. only last month. Like his more prolific friend and fellow Yankee, the late Charles Ives, Ruggles writes dissonant but cogent and original music. Sun Treader is a sober, seamless, one-movement tribute to a tragic hero, for thus Browning addressed Shelley eleven years after he was drowned ("Sun-treader, life and light be thine forever!"). Performed by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Zoltan Rozsnyai conducting...